"One of the great achievements of capitalism is to develop human productive capacity to such an extent that it makes the radical egalitarianism needed for human flourishing materially feasible, yet capitalism also creates institutions and power relations that block the actual achievement of egalitarianism."
E.O. Wright
Islamic banking
is banking or banking activity that is consistent with the principles of Islamic law (Sharia) and its practical application through the development of Islamic economics. Sharia prohibits the fixed or floating payment or acceptance of specific interest or fees (known as Riba or usury) for loans of money. Investing in businesses that provide goods or services considered contrary to Islamic principles is also Haraam (forbidden). While these principles may have been applied to historical Islamic economies, it is only in the late 20th century that a number of Islamic banks were formed to apply these principles to private or semi-private commercial institutions within the Muslim community.
(source: wikipedia)
Reclaim the Streets
is a collective with a shared ideal of community ownership of public spaces. Participants characterize the collective as a resistance movement opposed to the dominance of corporate forces in globalization, and to the car as the dominant mode of transport.
Reclaim the Streets often stagenon-violent direct action street reclaiming events such as the ‘invasion’ of a major road, highway or freeway to stage a party. While this may obstruct the regular users of these spaces such as car drivers and public bus riders, the philosophy of RTS is that it is vehicle traffic, not pedestrians, who are causing the obstruction, and that by occupying the road they are in fact opening up public space. The events are usually spectacular and colourful, with sand pits for children to play in, free food and music, however they have been known to degenerate into riots and violence. A Temporary Autonomous Zone sometimes results. The style of the parties in many places has been influenced by the rave scene in the UK, with sound systems playing dance music.
Reclaim The Streets was originally formed by Earth First! in Brixton, London, in Autumn 1991and was born out of anti-road protest camps at places such as Claremont Road andTwyford Down. The idea of street reclaiming soon spread throughout the United Kingdom. The first actions can be seen as specifically anti-car and pro-alternative transport, but over the years the members of the core group changed its focus, realising that it was better to go to the root of the problem as they saw it, namely the capitalist system. “Our streets are as full of capitalism as of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious.” Nevertheless, the actions always followed the principle of non-violent direct action.
(source: wikipedia)
The ecological footprint
is a measure of human demand on the Earth’s ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet’s ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to assimilate associated waste. Using this assessment, it is possible to estimate how much of the Earth (or how many planet Earths) it would take to support humanity if everybody followed a given lifestyle. For 2006, humanity’s total ecological footprint was estimated at 1.4 planet Earths – in other words, humanity uses ecological services 1.4 times as fast as Earth can renew them.
(source: wikipedia)
Recuperation
in the sociological sense, is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are commodified and incorporated within a mainstream society and, thus, become interpreted through a more socially acceptable or conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the appropriation of any subversive works or ideas by mainstream media or culture. It is the opposite of détournement, in which images and other cultural artifacts are appropriated from mainstream sources and repurposed with radical intentions.
The concept in political philosophy of recuperation was first proposed by members of the Situationist International. The term is intended to convey a negative connotation because recuperation generally bears the intentional consequence (whether perceived or not) of fundamentally altering the meanings behind ideas due to their appropriation or being co-opted into the ruling discourse.
(picture taken from the series of Fabian Ciraolo)
According to Michel Foucault, biopower
is a technology of power, which is a way of managing people as a group. The distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations. It is thus an integral feature and essential to the workings of and makes possible the emergence of the modern nation state and capitalism, etc. Biopower is literally having power over bodies; “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations”. Foucault elaborates further in his lecture courses on Biopower entitled Security,Territory,Population delivered at the Collège de France between January and April 1978
“…”By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I have called biopower”….”
It relates to the government’s concern with fostering the life of the population, and centers on the poles of Disciplinary institutions (“an anatomo-politics of the human body”) andregulatory controls (“a biopolitics of the population”). In his lecture course Society Must Be Defended, Foucault claims that the previous Greco-Roman,Medieval (rule of the emperors and monarchs) model of power and social control over the body was an individualizing mode. However, all this was drastically and dramatically altered with the discovery of the human sciences and together with the invention of Disciplinary institutions, the transfer through forcible removal of various European monarchs into a ‘scientific’ state apparatus and the reinvention of judiciary practices and the advent of anatomo-politics of the human body which took place between the 16th and 18th centuries.A second mode for seizure of power was discovered;while this type of power was stochastic, this brand new version of power mutated from previous versions in the past which transformed into “massifying”, not individualizing as in previous cases. This type of power,which Foucault calls Biopower contrasts differently with past traditional modes of power based on the threat of death from a sovereign. This power is no longer “directed at man-as-body, but at man-as-species”. In an era where power must be justified both rationally and politically, biopower is utilized by an emphasis on the protection of life rather than the threat of death, on the regulation of the body, and the production of other technologies of power, such as the notion of sexuality. Regulation of customs, habits, health, reproductive practices, family, “blood”, and “well-being” would be straightforward examples of biopower, as would any conception of the state as a “body” and the use of state power as essential to its “life”.
(source: wikipedia)
Squatting of empty lots with shanty towns became popular in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the shortage of urban accommodation during the rural exodus. Gradually it was substituted by high-rise blocks (often built quickly and poorly). It was revived in the mid-1980s during the La Movida Madrileña, under the name of the okupa (an unofficial spelling applied to ocupación) movement, when thousands of illegal squatted buildings were legalized. Influenced by the British Levellers, the movement’s popularity rose again during the 1990s, once more due to a housing crisis, this time related to the 1992 Summer Olympics and the concomitant urban regeneration. Propertyspeculation and house price inflation continue to catalyze okupa activism.
As of 2007, there were approximately 200 occupied houses in Barcelona. At least 45 of these, as Infousurpa, a collective event calendar, mentions, are used as social and cultural centers—so- called “open houses”. A number of popular rock groups have come out of this kind of venue, such as Sin Dios, Extremoduro, Kolumna Durruti, Refugio and Platero y Tu in Madrid and Ojos de Brujo and Gadjo in Barcelona.Related to the anarchist movement, okupas support the ideal of Autogestion and create social centers, such as Patio Maravillas in Madrid, which carry out various grassroots activities. The okupa movement represents a highly politicized form of squatting, so much so that participants often claim they live in squats as a form of political protest first and foremost.The movement is involved in various other social struggles, including the alter-globalization movement. In 1996, during José María Aznar’s presidency, the first specific legislation against squatting was passed and became the prelude to many squat evictions. In the barrio of Lavapiés in Madrid, the Eskalera Karakola was a feminist self-managed squat, which was active from 1996 to 2005 and participated in the nextGENDERation network. Other examples are the Escuela Popular de Prosperidad o Minuesa.
(source: wikipedia)
